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Season Twelve Episode Eight Preceded by: Season Twelve, Episode Seven: Ghost Town Followed by: Season Twelve, Episode Nine: Pimp My Ride Summary : The party stares at the strange letters. Ashra works for hours trying to decode them without success. Someone goes out and investigates the next building. It has a small anteroom and a large stone desk, but nothing interesting. They come back. Ashra keeps working on the letters. The party knocks on the slab and determines it is about six inches thick. Ashra keeps working on the letters. : Finally Ashra tells the rest of the party that they'd better do something to help, because she is not getting this. Leilah asks for her adamantine dagger, and begins carving away at the stone. After another long wait, she hands back the dagger and points out the person-sized hole she's carved in the slab. Cicero crawls through alone, then Ashra and Leilah each test the passage by going halfway through with someone holding onto their legs (or ... well, holding onto something, anyway.) They find that on the other side is a strange magical film, like quicksilver. : On the other side of the film is warm, moist air. They are in a room which looks like the interior of a dungeon, but very nicely carpeted and with bookshelves covering the walls. Everburning Torches light the room. There is another door filled with the same strange film. The party passes through and into the room, and finds Cicero fiddling around with things. : This room is even more awesome than it initially appeared. All of the books are first editions of rare books in mint condition; they do not appear even to have aged. They are disorganized, but all fascinating. There is a beautiful globe of the planes. On a desk lie notes on a spell someone is developing. : "Hey, put that down, it's a first edition! Well, it's going to have been a first edition." The party is greeted by a young, nerdy looking man with goggles pushed high on his forehead. He identifies himself as Talnec Franco, and welcomes the party to his study. He leads them into another room where they can sit, and offers them refreshments before settling down to explain what has happened. : In 1252 of the old calendar, Talnec begins, he was working on several spells. One was a common shelter spell, one was Rope Trick, and one was an atemporal pocket where people could find themselves either fixed in time or outside of time entirely. The King of Malvont gave him funding to find a way to step outside of time, and he did so. His apparent "disappearance" from the Prime was in fact his retirement to this study, where he can work on his research forever, assisted by countless Perfect Dichotomies of himself. (Another Talnec passes down the hall in a bathrobe and waves.) : He can himself only enter the timeline at a few set locations, but he can choose when he does so. This has odd effects on the theory of causality, which he's still looking into. : He has summoned the party here for a specific purpose. Talnec can see every possible timeline from his secret study, and many of them end on June 10, 1444. He has met with many versions of Ashra and Leilah, and he has asked each of them to go back in time and save their world. Some have accepted, some have declined; some have succeeded, some have failed. He will send the party back in time by several months, and when they arrive they will know what to do. He warns the party that there will be at least two or three of each of them on their Prime Material Plane, and that she needs to make sure they do not meet or the effects could be catastrophic. Before their journey they are free to rest in the secret study; their spells will not return, but they can at least sleep away their weariness. He will also answer any questions the party may have. : The party first has a quick discussion of who could have been behind the Awakening. If the Awakening was actually brought about with massive amounts of Futurium, then the party can trace the mining involved. Leilah points out that Futurium can only be mined with adamantium tools, which will be easier to trace. Ashra offers that she's good friends with the main adamantium dealer in the South, and she can give him a call as soon as they're back in the right timeline. There are many gods that have an end of the world mythology; the only figure that the party can think of who would specifically want to cut off the Prime from all gods and divine magic is Barron Ganth. There is also the question of Mechanus's function. : With some ideas about what to do set out, Ashra asks a few other questions of Talnec. He explains that her The Dark Lantern is one of several Reaper's Lanterns in existence. Such lanterns are usually made to collapse the Heavens into the Hells, but they never work as planned. This one is a Lantern of Nerull, and destroying it will collapse several universes. Its intermediate power is channeling the souls within it into buffs for the user. The increase in souls within it is probably because the scythe which the party destroyed was not the scythe corresponding to the lantern. : Xenteroth was the regent of a country on the north of the Southern Continent for some time, and operated a small fiefdom there. Talnec does not consider him in his own league as a time traveler, and thinks that his movements through time are probably not purposeful or controlled. : Perfect Dichotomy functions by bringing a version of oneself from the future into the present. There will therefore be two of the caster for a set loop of time: rounds, days, months, years. After the duration ends, the caster will disappear from time completely for the same amount of time as they live out the other half of the spell. : Ashra asks who Ashra E is, and Talnec replies that she knows her. Ashra starts wondering if she's her own Mother. Again. She doesn't bring it up further. : The party spends a few nights resting, then asks to be sent back. Talnec takes them back into the study, wishes them well, and tells them to step through the door on his command. He pulls the goggles down over his face, then flips some large and impressive looking switches. Everything starts humming and pulsing, and he yells for them to go now. The party jump through the door and back through time. : It's a rough trip. Everyone feels a bit inside-out when they land in 1443, and no one is quite awake. Leilah wakes up first: the Mountain Runner is crouched over her and has slapped her awake. She explains that her name is Matria, and she was sent by Hannibal Maloch to fetch the party from this location. She moves over to slap Ashra, and Leilah asks permission to do it herself. : Ashra, Avi, and Aether are easily woken up, but Cicero is a bit worse off and needs to be healed from the journey. Once everyone is awake, the party finds that they are in a small, chilly room with a makeshift camp in it. Matria explains that she works for CorinthianBlue Mail Corporation, and was sent to escort them south to Bisau. It is November 13, 1443. This places the other version of the party still on Mechanus. Matria did bother some aboleths nearby, so the party shouldn't take too long to head out. They rest, receive delicious spells, and hit the road. : The party reaches Bisau at mid-evening on the 14th. Hannibal greets them and explains that there's something really bad going on that the party has to stop. The party says he doesn't know the half of it, and they all head back to the ship together to plan. Snugglesworth is surprised to see everyone; they explain they forgot a few things and will be off again soon. : Leilah and Anahita cast Greater Scry on each other so they can finally have a good mother-daughter chat. Everyone else kind of stares a bit at the sexy waterfall as she discusses Great Danger. There is a great threat to her waters, she explains. In several months time, the points on this plane that touch ours will come into convergence by some great outburst of ill-gotten magic. She fears it is a threat to herself and her family and plane. : The party discusses the Futurium problem in more detail. It is an extremely dense ore, very hard to mine. Because it takes so much of it to generate the antimagic effects, there is no real reason to mine it for most people, and it is usually considered a nuisance. There was a neogi buying up people's scraps of it after other mining efforts. The deposits extend beyond Prospero, and it can be mined there, though it usually isn't. There is also some by Mind's Touch. There is none on the Northern Continent. Even without interference from pirates, it would take years to surreptitiously collect enough to use it on this scale. On the other hand, it could be disguised as land development. : Now that Leilah has her spells, she uses AD on everyone and everything the party hasn't been able to check out for a while. Hannibal and Matria each have a few spells. The strange finger-sheath the party had looted will lower one's effective caster level, as a way of peacebinding a spellcaster. The strange compass from the Axiomates' hoard is a Compass of Find the Path, which always points to where one wants to go most. When Ashra holds it, it points into the Ornan Jungle, where she last saw her Mother. When Leilah and Hannibal hold it, it points to Benin Falls. When Cicero holds it it points east by northeast, and even he isn't sure why. : The party next calls on Shiolay. He is glad to hear from them, and looks at his books. The best tools are sold at the third circle in Malvont, but not in the bulk necessary for this kind of operation. He sold a large shipment to Goneril's military outfitters, but they could've used it for anything. He sells a lot to smiths in Nyasa City. There have been three spikes in demand in recent years: one in 1436, one in 1441, and one in 1443. There have been small shipments through T'Nari Trans-Oasis and CorinthianBlue, and a large amount was purchased by Neax Hiss. There was a small shipment through a LLC routing back to Marcus Fairlan's organization. : Hannibal explains that T'Nari Trans-Oasis probably bought it because djinni love the stuff. Only a few djinni can cast Wish, and they are typically enslaved; the enslavement bracers are made out of adamantine. : The party starts to draw up plans for further investigation... Category:Episodes Category:Season Twelve Episodes